The Captor's Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis

Basil Dufallo

Abstract

An influential view of ecphrasis (the literary description of art objects) treats it primarily as a way for authors to write about their own texts, and even to insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. This book argues for the inadequacy of this view in the case of ancient Rome, and the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range of Latin authors—including Plautus, Terence, Catullus, Horace, Vergil, Pr ... More

An influential view of ecphrasis (the literary description of art objects) treats it primarily as a way for authors to write about their own texts, and even to insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. This book argues for the inadequacy of this view in the case of ancient Rome, and the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range of Latin authors—including Plautus, Terence, Catullus, Horace, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, Statius, and Martial—Dufallo shows that Roman ecphrasis stages an ambivalent receptivity to Greek culture with implications for shifting notions of Roman identity in the Republican and Imperial periods. Individual chapters explore how the simple assumption of a self-asserting ecphrastic text is called into question by comic performance, self-consciously inconsistent narrative, the thematization of civil discord, Greek religious iconography, the contradictory associations of epic imagery, satiric poetry and the satiric novel, and the author's subjection to a patron. Visual material such as wall painting, statuary, and drink ware contextualizes the discussion. The book resituates a major literary trope deep within its hybrid cultural context, and argues for ecphrasis as a cultural practice through which the Romans sought, over some four hundred years of their history, to redefine Romanness both with and against Greekness.

End Matter

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